Take 2. Friday's guide to movies and music.

Ready Or Not, Actors Are Finding Themselves Back In The Saddle Again

Halfway into Walter Hill's "Geronimo," a cavalry officer named Lt. Charles Gatewood (played by Jason Patric), is challenged to a duel on horseback by an angry Apache.

The Apache, firing his gun, charges toward him.

The lieutenant sits impassively for a while, then yanks his horse's head to the side, apparently causing the animal to fall. Now, with a big horse to lie behind, he returns fire. The battle won, he kicks the horse to its feet and-somehow-gets on in the process.

Patric himself performs the maneuver. So one might assume that the actor was an experienced horseman.

"He didn't know how to ride," says Rudy Ugland, who, as the film's head wrangler, was responsible for the horseback sequences. Patric learned his skills at Ugland's ranch north of Los Angeles, where the wrangler keeps up to 80 horses for movie productions.

Ugland, who is 55, says there were about 700 wranglers in the business when he began riding in TV westerns in 1956. "Every television show was a western," he says. "Now there may be 35 active wranglers making a living."

Their fortunes have turned upward since "Dances With Wolves" in 1990. That epic seems to have sparked a number of films-even television shows like "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman"-that require riding.

In fact, anything set before the turn of the century may use wranglers. This year, horses have played a part in "Sommersby," "Much Ado About Nothing," "The Ballad of Little Jo," "Into the West," "Geronimo," "The Three Musketeers" and "Tombstone," among others.

Next year, with its bonanza of westerns, promises to be even more horse-packed. Ugland has just finished work on the movie version of "Maverick," starring Mel Gibson and James Garner.

Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey will ride in a comedy called "Tucson." Lovitz and Billy Crystal will make an appearance in "City Slickers 2."

Kevin Costner will star in Lawrence Kasdan's "Wyatt Earp," coming next summer. Two movies detailing the life of Wild Bill Hickok are due. Rob Lowe plays Jesse James in "Frank and Jesse," now in production. Luke Perry will play a rodeo champion in "Lane Frost." "Outlaws," with women in the saddle, has been filmed.

"Bad Girls," also billed as an all-female western, is scheduled for release in the spring. And Sharon Stone is now shooting "The Quick and the Dead," another western.

In nearly four decades of wrangling, Ugland claims he's never met an actor he couldn't train to ride. Apparently, he never met Charlie Sheen.

In the recent "Three Musketeers," Sheen was called upon to look comfortable in the saddle. He was far from it, said the director, Steven Herek, describing a scene in which the four principals-Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt and Chris O'Donnell-ride off into the distance.

"Everything was great," Herek says. "Then, all of a sudden, we hear these expletives and `Whoa, whoa, stop!' Immediately, we knew who it was."

Sheen had announced even before filming that he was phobic about horses; the horses in turn seemed unwilling to do what he wanted. Assistant wranglers had to catch Sheen, whose horse was running away with him. After that, he refused to repeat the scene, forcing Herek to use a stunt double.

"The Three Musketeers" was Herek's first experience with horses, and he found it both amusing and frustrating. The movie's Spanish mounts, which the director had been told were the finest, turned out to be too smart for their own good. They began galloping every time Herek yelled "Action!" Eventually, he had to substitute a word like "banana!" or use a hand gesture.

"Our biggest problem wasn't getting them to move," he says, "but getting them to stand still."

While the Musketeers spent days honing their horsemanship, Ugland says neither Jack Nicholson nor Marlon Brando put in many hours on horseback preparing for a film he worked on nearly 20 years ago, "The Missouri Breaks." Instead, he said, when the time came they simply acted like great riders.

By contrast, "Jason Patric came out here every day for two months" and practiced on a quiet horse, Ugland says. "Riding is balance and rhythm. He's a good athlete, so he learned quickly."

Seeing that Patric had mastered his first horse, Ugland suggested one with more spirit and intelligence, a 6-year-old named Whiskey. "He's not one of my easier horses, but he's always alert, real responsive. Jason liked the looks of him and wanted to ride him in the movie."

Ugland eventually showed Patric how to make Whiskey collapse to the ground, a trick he'd only recently taught the horse. When Patric performed the maneuver for the director, the script was altered to include the scene.

It takes months to teach a horse to drop down, Ugland says. "`As long as you don't hurt them, they don't mind," he said. The horse responds to a signal-a tug on a cable attached to the bridle.

The effect can be startling. In the 1989 film "Old Gringo," Jimmy Smits apparently shoots a horse out from under Gregory Peck. So convinced was the British Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that the horse had actually been killed that it banned Columbia Pictures from exhibiting the film in England.

Twister lived to star in "Geronimo," too.

In "Geronimo," Duvall appears to take a tremendous tumble as Twister goes down, once again the victim of movie gunfire. Duvall's stunt double, Danny Costa, jokes that when the director yelled "Cut," the crew rushed in to ensure that Twister had survived; only then did they check on him.